


So Much Better (Than the Last One I Made)

by TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: (shhh that becomes evident in chapter 3), Angst, Character Study, Coming Out, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gay Will Byers, Gen, Good Parent Jim "Chief" Hopper, Good Parent Joyce Byers, Happy Ending, Internalized Homophobia, Jim "Chief" Hopper Lives, Post-Canon, Protective Mike Wheeler, Sad Will Byers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:21:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27361915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: “Will.”“You can’t help me in this.”“I can,” she says, with the conviction of Jim Hopper standing on a platform and closing his eyes to meet the blast.El’s hand comes up to rest on Will’s forearm, still crossed over his chest. “I can try to take it away,” she whispers.It slips out of him too easily. “I don’t think you can take away being gay,” he says, even softer.Seconds pass, and El doesn’t move. Will blinks through the surprising crystalline wetness in his lashes. He thought he would feel the earth move beneath his feet the moment he said it aloud. He thought the sun would shift in Eleven’s face, the curtains might rend in two like the sky when they nailed the Messiah to the cross. Or maybe the air would turn to ice and fill his veins with that living death of misery like the shadow monster.None of these things happen. He breathes, and El breathes, and they look at each other, each one quizzical in their own right. Only his heart begins to thump a little unevenly.“What’s gay?” she asks, finally.--Or: 3 times Will Byers came out to his loved ones, and 1 time he didn't have to.
Relationships: Jonathan Byers & Will Byers, Joyce Byers & Will Byers, Will Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper, Will Byers & Jim "Chief" Hopper, Will Byers & Mike Wheeler
Comments: 34
Kudos: 76





	1. Friends Don't Refuse Help

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *wheels in on my heelys* Y'all may or may not know me from my behemoth works of angsty found family for the marvel fandom. Well, there I was in quarantine in dire need of new shows to watch, and there Stranger Things be with all its found family glory. And so here I am with my first ST fic, filling my insatiable need to have Will Byers FINALLY be able to unload on someone, come out, share his problems, and have some proper healing like! the god! damn! boy! deserves!!
> 
> Theme song and title inspiration: ["The Last One I Made"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GPaib8Pcj4) by Pim Stones (this ish is heartbreaking, y'all)

Ten o’clock on a Thursday evening in Rossville, Illinois, finds Will Byers quietly slathering cherry cobbler from a jar onto his raw pie crust in its crinkly foil tray.

He hasn’t touched his colored pencils and sketchpads in ages. Not since the first week they all moved into the new house, really, and he tried to pick up the colors and paper but they felt wrong in his hands. Or rather: his hands felt wrong for them.

Will figures that trauma is as good an excuse as any to reinvent yourself, so he doesn’t push himself to pick up his art where he left off. Instead, he lets the bundle of new supplies from Mike and Dustin and Lucas collect dust under his bed, and he throws himself into baking and knitting instead. Jonathan is scarily good at the latter, considering that he doesn’t care at all for it. Joyce has been trying to learn it for the last three or four years now-- _try_ being the operative word--and has approximately two-thirds of a never-ending basket weave scarf to show for it.

Will isn’t the only one who’s changed. Normally Joyce, lax in many areas except for bedtime, wouldn’t have it with any of her boys up and about the house past nine on a school night. But now after the move, she’s gone strangely nocturnal like the rest of them. Will doubts she actually likes to stay up. More than likely, the insomnia creeps up on all of them, no matter how much they deny it by filling the space of their sleeplessness with movie marathons and weird baking sessions and--balloon painting, of all things, near midnight.

El doesn’t seem to sense that much of a change. Will figures she had less of a rigid schedule being cared for by Hopper all this time. She really could do with all these harmless little liberties for a lifetime, Will decides.

The girl herself ghosts into the doorway behind Will. She never makes enough noise to announce her presence, but it’s almost as if Will has gained a preternatural foreshadowing of anything slightly more or less than human. Anything touched by the shadow of the Upside Down.

“Hi,” says El.

Will takes a second to turn around and look at her as she glides to his side. Her fingers fidget for a bit and then she leans her palms against the beveled edge of the counter and flexes her hands, as if unsure what to do with them. Her hair has been growing out and it’s in two neat little dutch braids now.

“Hi,” Will says back, and grabs another spoon from the drawer and hands the open jar to her to help her fill the space. He’s not delighted to be sharing his baking time with another person, not exactly, but there are definitely worse people than Jane Hopper to be around at a time like this.

“Why do you have apple wedges?” asks El.

“Dustin said his mom always bakes it that way. A little bit of cherry and a little bit of apple,” Will explains.

And that’s that.

Almost immediately El falls into a rhythm as she and Will alternate between slathering on the cherry filling and dropping the slices of pink lady apple in another layer on top. When that’s finished, Will moves seamlessly to the flat sheet of dough he just rolled out before El came in.

“Strips?” says El.

Will nods. He hesitates, but without even looking up at his stepsister he can sense her yearning to do something useful with her hands. He takes the pizza cutter from his side of the counter and, coughing a little into his fist, hands it to her.

“But I haven’t--”

“Just. One-inch strips. Please.”

Their hands brush against each other over the handle of the pizza cutter. Warm. Clammy. Traitorous hints of all the things in their heads they try to run away from by making, making, making, creating little bursts of beauty in a world that neither of them is entirely sure is real anymore.

“Okay,” says El in nothing more than a whisper. She takes the cutter and slices through the dough. It’s straight enough. After inspecting it, she estimates another inch and draws the circular blade through with more confidence.

The sound of the blade against the well-worn knife grooves in the cutting board begins to soothe Will too much. He hates being too at ease, falling into the lull of comfort around him and dropping his guard. He jerks upright from where he’s been leaning unconsciously against the counter and goes to the fridge. Opens it and reaches in for something. Anything. The water jug.

Well, he didn’t really intend to drink water, but now he’s stuck with it, so he scooches past El to grab a glass from the cabinet and fill it. He sets the pitcher down with a deliberate clink on the tile.

It gets a little easier to breathe, a little easier to feel alert, when his back is turned to El and he can focus on the shaking of his hand around the glass instead of the comforting whoosh of the pizza cutter.

“Sorry,” he says around a mouthful of water. “I didn’t mean to be short with you.”

The glide of the blade stops. Will wonders if it’s because his apology startled El, or because she was actually finished with the strips. He forgot to count.

“You don’t have to be.” El’s voice usually has a nasal quality to it, the kind that gives away her youth. It sounds even more so now, strange and caught in the back of her mouth.

Will shrugs. “Still. I know we’re both tired from...different things. Um. It’s really nice of you to come in and help me, is all I wanted to say. And I guess I wasn’t really making you feel that way.”

El seems to consider that. There’s a little slap, like she’s attempted to lay the first strip across the cherry filling. Will should probably turn around and start helping her, because he really wanted to try out weaving the strips over and under each other this time. But he doesn’t. Not yet, at least.

“You’re already nice to me,” says El in a small voice.

Will pinches his nose, elbow on the counter. “Not really.”

El doesn’t seem to have a counterargument. After another beat, she says in that deliberate way of hers, “It’s really weird to have someone new in the family. You and your mom and brother were together for a long time.”

“I guess.”

“And you’re way nicer than Papa.”

A memory of Hopper’s eyes, narrow and fierce as he stalked across the mall tiles to kneel down next to a bleeding El, flashes across Will’s mind. Distant. But throbbing, enough to make him scream, even though he has no right to because Hopper was never his father figure and it’s not like he’ll ever get the chance to know him as such, anyway. Will tries not to hurt.

And Will’s second thought, upon realizing that El is referring to that mad scientist and not the chief who took her in, is that that is a _really_ fucking low bar to set for anyone.

“Anyone would be nicer than him,” Will all but scoffs. He swallows down the bile of his tone with the last of his water and lets himself choke on the mouthful. It feels better. At least now he can turn around and face El, sort of, with his hip leaning back against the counter, while he pretends to flick droplets from his sweater.

“I’m sorry,” says El.

What the fuck? That makes Will jerk his head up and look straight at her.

“Huh?”

“I’m sorry for...everything,” she clarifies. “Sorry for opening the gate.”

Will absolutely gets that sentiment, but he doesn’t quite follow.

It seems that El is beginning to flounder as much as he is. Her brows knit together and her hands still over the second-to-last strip of dough. “Um. Was I wrong?”

“Wrong with what?”

“I thought...that was the reason you were a little…” She scratches the inside of her arm. “Distant.”

Will nearly chokes again. He’s well aware that he has been distant with his new sister, but hardly for any of the reasons that have apparently been courting her guilt complex these sleepless nights. He’s so caught up in the shock of the misunderstanding, staring at El and forgetting all about his pretense of cleaning his sweater, that he stands there speechless for several moments while El scrambles to fill the awkwardness with her own conclusions.

“If I never opened the gate...you wouldn’t have gone into the Upside Down. And. And if you didn’t go to the Upside Down, then Hop--” Her lips stumble on the name and she doesn’t finish it. “Then he would be alive, and you would be at your old house.”

Logically, Will can understand that.

“Then we would never have met,” says Will. His voice has found itself of its own accord.

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” El says back, with all the masked pain of someone who believes wholeheartedly in the knives coming out of their mouth.

“No. That’s--no. That is definitely _not_ a good thing. A good thing is--what’s a good thing is us meeting.”

Well, his character may be Will the Wise, but he never said he was Will the Eloquent.

“I know I don’t act like it,” Will says again. “I don’t...really act like myself at all. I guess I’m just sorry you never really got to see what I’m usually like. I promise it’s--I promise it’s not you.”

El’s hand ghosts over the shell of her ear, as if still accustomed to tucking a stray curl away there. Joyce must have been the one to braid her hair today. Back when they were still in Hawkins, it was Max who did her hair every day of the summer that they saw each other.

Will toes at the linoleum floor with the threadbare spot in his sock. He crosses his arms over his skinny chest. “And--there’s something else.”

El reaches for the jar of cherry filling, filled a third from the bottom now, and screws on the top too tightly.

“This probably sounds crazy, but. Most days when I wake up like--this, like, the me that I am now, it’s kind of hard to imagine that there could ever be a different version of me? Does that make sense? Like maybe...I was always meant to go into the Upside Down. I don’t know. Lucas and Max are always arguing about parallel universes and shit, and I guess it’s nice to believe in that because there _could_ be a version of our universe where none of this ever happened but we still get to be around each other and it’s…” Will searches for the perfect word. “Nice.”

El nods, eyes still trained on the counter. 

“But I don’t actually think a version of the universe like that exists.”

El’s head turns. Her eyes snap up to meet his. The contact burns, but he holds his ground, tamps down the flinch of the understanding burning between them. A chill creeps across the roots of his hair at his nape and skitters across the goosebumps on the flesh of his arms.

“Me neither,” says El. She doesn’t say anything else, because that’s just her and she’s not like everyone else. She wasn’t born with the need to make anyone else feel at ease, much less to make somebody hear her and understand her completely. Will knows her a little bit more by now, and he knows she probably means that the Upside Down is engraved indelibly in their identities. Some post-traumatic supernatural shit like that.

And he guesses that’s what he means, too, only not exactly. Not entirely.

What he really means is that it’s easier to think that in every version of himself, the Upside Down factors in somehow, because crawling through the slimy belly of the monstrous universe is an easier explanation for everything that’s wrong with him. If he so much as believed that a happy, naive Will Byers still existed somewhere out there, laughing with his buddies in the Wheelers’ basement over casting a fireball, then he could never explain the depth and the wrongness of everything that ached inside him.

Mrs. Grossman from English class once said that people often see something in us that we ourselves could take years to recognize. Of course, she could have been talking about anything from Huck Finn’s characterization to his classmates Tara and Georgie being in total denial about their _thing_. Still, the sting of the truth in her words has never left Will’s brain.

Troy was right. He and his blockheaded buddies, thick as they were--“most likely to spend adulthood falling down the stairs drunk,” in Joyce’s words--could see right through Will. They could see the wrong.

“What is it?” asks El.

Will shakes himself back to the present to find that he hasn’t broken eye contact with her. He opens his mouth to say, _nothing_. But she beats him to it.

“You do that a lot. You think too fast and you go somewhere else I can’t reach.”

Will knows she’s observant, but he never knew she actually paid attention to him. Only Jonathan does that, because he doesn’t care about being a cool brother.

That stops Will in his train of thought. He looks at El, really looks at her this time, and considers the consequences of what he’s about to tell her.

She knows how to keep a secret. He’s heard her crying in her sleep once or twice, and getting up out of bed to sit in the bay window by the moonlight on those occasions, but she’s never uttered a word about it.

“I want to help,” says El.

He believes her. He really does.

“I don’t know if you can,” he says. “I don’t know if you should.”

Behind him, the oven screeches as the temperature reaches 375. Will jumps. El remains deathly still, like a strange and determined cat, eyes trained only on him.

“New rule,” she says softly. “Friends don’t refuse help.”

A choked-off little sound aborts itself in the back of Will’s throat. “Good fucking luck to Mike, then.”

“Will.”

“You can’t help me in this.”

“I can,” she says, with the conviction of Jim Hopper standing on a platform and closing his eyes to meet the blast.

El’s hand comes up to rest on Will’s forearm, still crossed over his chest. “I can try to take it away,” she whispers.

It slips out of him too easily. “I don’t think you can take away being gay,” he says, even softer.

Seconds pass, and El doesn’t move. Will blinks through the surprising crystalline wetness in his lashes. He thought he would feel the earth move beneath his feet the moment he said it aloud. He thought the sun would shift in Eleven’s face, the curtains might rend in two like the sky when they nailed the Messiah to the cross. Or maybe the air would turn to ice and fill his veins with that living death of misery like the shadow monster.

None of these things happen. He breathes, and El breathes, and they look at each other, each one quizzical in their own right. Only his heart begins to thump a little unevenly.

“What’s gay?” she asks, finally.

He grabs the pie from the counter and shoves it into the oven. His fingers shake just a little as he sets the timer.

“Will?” she tries again. “What is gay?”

Something in the tinge of her voice tells Will that she’s not as naive as the framing of her question might suggest. He daren’t hope that she’s giving him a way out, or a way in. A way to explain this to her in his own terms. He’s never entertained hope like that from the universe, because it’s always tended to fuck him over in the department of people affording him that sort of kindness.

He could say, _nothing_. He could say, _forget I said anything._ Maybe even _you’re right, I’m just messed up, the Upside Down never really leaves you_. And laugh awkwardly and finish his glass of water and put away the utensils in the dishwasher.

But he doesn’t. He’s Will the Wise, even though he’s always wanted to be Will the Brave. He doesn’t think that running and running through the petrifying gray and slime of home-that-is-not-home and hiding in the clammy reflection of Castle Byers while the toxicity stopped up his lungs ever counted as bravery.

But maybe facing her question, facing himself, here and now, could count.

“Gay is...when I don’t like girls,” he says. “Not like that.”

“So you like boys.”

“It’s wrong.”

She says, “No, it’s not.”

He stops to wonder how much of that is because she likes him and pities him. He wonders, on the heels of that, if she’s even capable of dissembling.

Maybe this was the reason why the voice in the back of his head, the one he likes to ignore, told him she was the one he could tell this to. He cares about her, but not enough to hurt too badly if things went south. He’s prevented himself from caring about her that way. Caring like that is dangerous. Painful.

But now that she’s uttered those three words and in the span of that moment shattered all his defenses, stripped away his expectations of rejection, he has no fucking clue what to do.

He should say something. It’s his turn now, anyhow.

“I mean it,” El says, slowly, sadly, as if this time she’s been able to track every flit of the frantic thoughts inside his scrambled head.

“You’re the first one I’ve told,” says Will. It tastes suddenly like stones in his throat. It could be a good thing: feeling this, feeling anything. He was bound to panic at some point.

El clearly doesn’t know what to say to that. She doesn’t thank him, or ask him why. To be fair, she still doesn’t know a lot about normal human interactions, and something about that kind of puts Will at ease now. She just nods.

“Will you tell your mom and brother?”

“I don’t know why I need to.” Will shifts his hands up to slide over his face and bury his cheeks into his fingertips. The pads of his fingers leave streaks of neon-colored pressure behind his eyelids.

“It makes you drift really far away when you keep it inside.” It sounds like she’s smiling a little. Ironically. “Like when you look at me but you’re looking somewhere else. You might not...ever be able to come back.”

Damn her. Damn Eleven, damn Jane Hopper and her uncanny ability to put into words the very thing that Will knows between the chords of his heart but has never been brave enough to own up to.

There’s no going back now, not when someone else has laid out the truth for him. This is the shift he’s been looking for, the tension he was waiting to shoot through his body. There’s relief mixed up in it somehow, a shuddering and unstable kind, and he knows deep down inside that she’s right: he’s finally gotten a taste of what it is to be himself. Anything less than that would be like cramming the thirty-foot mass of all of himself into a jack-in-the-box.

“Then I guess I will,” he admits quietly. “Sometime. Not today. But...yeah.”

“Soon?” A question, not a pressure point.

His smile is thin but genuine. He nods. “Soon.”

She moves closer to him and her lanky arms wrap around his neck. They breathe awkwardly against each other. Then Will remembers himself and untangles his hands from the folds of his sweater to lift his arms slowly, cautiously, around her waist.

“You can ask me anything,” he whispers as an afterthought.

He could swear he feels the ghost of her smile in the way the pattern of her breathing changes. It’s been so long since he saw her smile around him. No: since he _made_ her smile.

“I can write the questions down,” she compromises.

Will chuckles to himself. “I promise I won’t try to educate you through _Cosmo_.”

A snort of inelegance rips through her. Will joins her a heartbeat later. They’re still hugging, and it’s getting kind of weird, honestly, but the kitchen is warm and glowing and it’s still a long time until the timer will ring for them to check on the pie. The halogen light over the kitchen sink is pulsing sleepily over their heads, one of the bulbs long blown out. Will finds he doesn’t mind this feeling. He doesn’t mind it at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been writing this like a mad lad and already have part 2 almost finished. Originally, this was gonna be a longfic like one of my legendary beasts for the Iron Fam, but ultimately I decided against that so I could just flesh out each individual coming out scene more and make it special. Aside from a supportive El, the coming parts also feature badass Joyce, a reunion with Mike and Hopper to rule all reunions, and the bestest big brother in the world!
> 
> What did you think? What part so far stood out to you most? Give me validatioooooon but also thank you so much for clicking on this and reading it and any and all feedback is deeply appreciated <3 -kaleb
> 
> my socials:  
> tumblr: theoceanismyinkwell  
> insta: kc.barrie


	2. A Little Sound That Has No Name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Every time Will opens his mouth to come out to Joyce, something stops his throat up. So he sets out to pen a letter to her in which he comes out. He plans to give it to her on Christmas, but the universe has other plans and she unearths it somehow on the day he's least prepared to face this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the kind reception to the first chapter!! I was so encouraged by seeing familiar names and faces in the comments, even from folks who don't even watch stranger things but just know my writing (!!!!), that I sat down and wrote the entire last half of this second chapter tonight to share with you. :)
> 
> Theme song for this chapter: ["We'll All Be Alright"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPyTsnYO9qs) by Amy Stroup x AG

Sometimes Will wishes he would have a crush on somebody at his new school. Anybody. Any boy, preferably, so that it could be an easy conversation starter whenever Joyce asks him idly who he has his eye on in his classes these days. At least that’s his wish on the days when he doesn’t absolutely just want to combust into a pile of organic matter rather than come to terms with being gay.

 _Come to terms_ sounds too formal. Clinical. And definitely imprecise, considering that he’s already come out to El without ever really intending to, one late night over cherry pie in the kitchen. Now that he knows that one person with possibly the most avenging yet moral heart in the world accepted him in the blink of an eye, and he sort of pledged to her that he’s taking the next step forward to tell the rest of his family, one would think that a kind of air of finality would settle over him. Some kind of determination.

He wonders why the universe is like...that. Why there’s no user manual that gives you a heads-up that hey, taking this option could potentially cause damage to social and family status, but also you get bonus points for being true to yourself. Some way to objectively weigh the pros and cons of this decision.

But it turns out he has his whole anxiety disorder to figure out every negative consequence to the last degree for him. As for the pros? Well. Apparently _being true to yourself_ can be a much, much peskier weight on your chest than previously imagined.

It’s a rare Monday morning when Joyce isn’t already out the door headed to work, and instead Jonathan’s the one out of the house early and it’s just Will and his mom sharing some scorched banana pancakes in the eat-in kitchen. It’s on that rare Monday morning, when Joyce’s laugh lines crinkle around her eyes as she looks over at her son and spoons some extra syrup on top of his butter for him, that Will comes to the conclusion that he can never come out to her verbally.

He tries. It’s the perfect moment. The haze in her eyes has lifted a bit, and true, there’s still a mist about her and the way she looks at everyone these days, but today there’s lightness in her face and he’s almost convinced that nothing could knock the smile from her visage this time.

Will gets as far as opening his mouth.

Joyce pauses mid-chew, interrupting herself in some mundane and convoluted tale of the woman looking for a specific type of dog leash in a specific type of material at the store the other day.

“I’m glad you’re okay today,” Will manages to get out.

It’s not what he meant to say. Far from it. But a pretty lucky save, and not far off from the truth.

“Honey,” says Joyce, in that funny way of hers where her shoulders fall and her head rolls a little to the side like some invisible thread of tension has been cut inside her.

“Are you okay, too?” she asks. Always thinking about him, about others, and not herself.

Will nods, because words fail him. Even if they didn’t, no words could really encompass the complexity of the leaden taste in his mouth and the single thump behind his ribs as he considers all the ways in which he hasn’t been okay. But he’s breathing, and he woke up from a dark sleep unplagued by dreams, and he has El in his corner. There are worse ways to be on a Monday morning.

“You can always tell me anything,” says Joyce.

“Same, Mom,” he says. “This was about you, not me.”

Joyce lets her fork slide to the side of her plate. “I’m doing okay, Will. Really. I really am.”

Will thinks he believes her today. He decides, too, that he can afford to mention Bob or Hopper once--not by name, but obliquely--to let her know he knows what’s really on her mind.

“It just really sucks. How you...almost have them.”

That came out way blunter than he intended. Will’s not usually like that. But then again, he doesn’t talk much, if at all, even around his mother, so anything that comes out of his mouth at an emotionally charged time like this is bound to sound more barbed than he meant it.

The wisp of a sigh blows through Joyce. “I know.”

Will pushes his food against the curve of his plate. “I’m sorry.”

“Will--”

“I know. I know. There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

That’s a lie, and Will’s throat still burns a little every time he repeats his mother’s little mantra. Because no matter how much he says it to himself, he will always be Eleven’s twin in this strange and different guilt they share. Will doesn’t remember much of his seizures and his possession--those days when hot and cold were at war inside his body and the creeping of ice over him was the premonition of another blackout--but at the same time he remembers, with absolute clarity, like the memory of a movie played every holiday since childhood, that if he had just fled from the shadow monster then his mother wouldn’t be gasping awake at half past three in the morning with the haunting of images of Bob’s guts spilling out onto antiseptic white tiles.

“I want you to believe it.” Joyce brushes her knuckles against the corduroy of Will’s sleeve. “I want you to say it as often as you need to, and I want you to believe it.”

Will nods again. “Okay.”

She levels a characteristic look at her son. “Promise.”

“Promise.” Will grabs onto her knuckles on an impulse. “I just wanted to let you know that it’s okay if...you know…”

 _If you’re not okay. Even if it would make me the happiest person in the world to see you smile_.

“If what?”

“Um.” Will goes back to munching on his breakfast. “I’m not as frail as some people think. You can talk to me if you need to.”

Joyce melts at that. “Well, right back atcha, honey.”

Will doesn’t protest the use of the nickname. He never really does, but this time in particular he chooses to enjoy it because pretty soon, he’s sure, she won’t be calling him _honey_ or _baby_ anymore. Not after he’s told her everything that needs to be said.

\--

He decides, then, that he’s going to write her a letter.

It’s a step. It’s a good one.

In his heart, it’s an even more momentous decision than the split second before the confession slipped out of him in front of El. It’s more deliberate, there’s more thought put into it, and there’s the interminable torture of the wait between now and the date before Christmas that he’s set to give it to Joyce, so in his mind it counts far more as bravery.

He’s not quite sure when his thought process became an eternal tossup between damage for cowardice and points for courage. Nearly his entire identity has been whittled down to this one tension inside him, and he knows there’s something that sounds very wrong about it, but after years of living in the aftermath of something every day, he’s sick and tired with himself for hiding in his castle.

 _Dear Mom_ , he writes out.

He kind of wishes they still had Jonathan’s vintage typewriter. They ended up selling it or throwing it out because of some irreparable demogorgon damage to it, Will can’t remember which. And the boys have always gotten by with just using the public computers at the library for the assignments that needed typing up.

He flexes his fingers and sets to writing again. He attempts the first paragraph with pen multiple times before giving up after probably the sixth balled-up piece of scratched-out paper. Then he picks up a pencil and goes at it again.

Will kind of wishes again there _were_ some kind of manual about being gay. Not for himself, this time, but for his mom. How easy it would be to just crack open a book written by Dr. So-and-So, take a highlighter to the important pages and shove the words into his mother’s hands when his own distinct lack of eloquence becomes a handicap.

But he has to do this. He has no one else to help. He has to do this, and the words have to be his own.

\--

The corduroy jackets turn into layered Fair Isle sweaters in shades of indigo and jade. Leaves rattle across the street, sounding lonely even as they go, and Will watches them from his new bedroom window and tries not to think about the dates flying by.

\--

The boys radio each other practically every night. Max isn’t always around to join in on the call because she tends to forget to charge her radio. But every time she’s over at Lucas’s, without fail she chimes in with the usual snide joke that lets Will know that she sees him. She hears him.

Dustin gets obsessed with chemistry, because apparently they’re starting to learn that now this semester. The boys leave all the worrying about explosions to Steve, since he’s the undisputed expert at that.

Lucas is skeptical as ever. He’s turning into something of a compromise between a pragmatic and an idealist, thanks to time and Max.

Mike is...Mike. A chatterbox. Talking about everyone and everything except whatever really matters. He never asks how El is when it’s just him and Will talking. Will likes to think that means something of an apology. Maybe someday he’ll start to feel guilty about it rather than enjoying it, and they’ll be okay. Not the way they were before--that’s impossible even for this fucked up universe where anything could happen--but better.

\--

It’s the day before the day before Thanksgiving. Second-to-Turkey-Day, Jonathan calls it. They’re packing up like crazy to head out tomorrow, and Will has just remembered that other thing he left wrapped under his bed that he needs to throw into his second backpack with the rest of his presents for the gang.

He’s all caught up in his mental checklist as he bursts through the back door into the kitchen, winded just a little and slamming his way into the house, when he skids to a halt because Joyce is standing still in front of him by the fridge and she’s holding something.

She’s still, so very still. An impossibility for Joyce Byers. The warning bells go off inside Will’s head. His gaze dips down to the thing in her hand.

Paper. A letter. His letter.

Will’s mouth dries so fast it’s nearly comical. He forgets to breathe, and the sound of his own blood thunders between the corners of his skull. Belatedly, he realizes that his backpack has slid off his shoulder and rolled to the linoleum with a thump.

“Hi,” says his mom.

It’s quiet.

She sounds...quiet.

Maybe even okay.

Will feels like he’s gushing, that something undefinable is pouring out of him from every side, and he can’t contain it even with the infinitesimal shaking of his skin because he could never put a name anyway to all the things inside himself.

“You’re getting really tall. Gosh,” says Joyce. She moves toward him. It’s like the plane on which Will is standing has crumpled in half. One minute she’s across the room, the next she’s right in front of him with her arms up in the air and her hands suspended like she almost wants to cup his face between them.

He’s rooted to the spot. The paralysis feels completely, entirely, utterly idiotic.

She’s not a shadow monster. She’s not a faceless beast with rings of teeth behind a venomous flower of a head. She’s his mom.

But somehow, that carries all the more weight of everything that has ever meant anything to Will Byers. And so he swallows, painfully, and he looks down at her--because it’s true, he outgrew his mother long ago.

“Hi,” Joyce says again.

“Hi,” Will breathes back.

“I got your letter.”

“Yeah,” Will says, still breathless.

A chuckle just as airy escapes her. “You were--going to mail this? To me? Seriously?”

Will bites his lip. It’s stupid, looking back, but he’d stuck the stamp on the corner of the empty envelope because the sheer idea of handing it to her or slipping it under her pillow terrified him.

“Sorry.”

“No sorry. Just--okay, that was a little funny.” Joyce shoots him a look. “More than funny. It was stupid funny. I could’ve sat down and cried from laughing if I hadn’t opened it up first.”

Will stares back at his mother. He doesn’t trust this tone--he doesn’t trust this. Maybe he should beat himself up for thinking there’s still a shoe to drop, when this is his _mom_ , but his anxiety never listened to reason.

Joyce cuffs him lightly on the shoulder. “You’re just such a one-of-a-kind sorta kid, aren’t you? Huh? Not gonna say anything? Okay, buddy, looks like I’m gonna do all the talking for now.” And then she attempts a smile. It’s watery. But it’s there.

She takes a moment to draw a breath. It shakes and rattles through her a little. Will watches the movement ripple into a thousand bits through her lungs.

“I always knew…” she starts out. “I always knew there was something different about you. I didn’t understand it--I appreciated it. But I didn’t…” The paper crumples a bit in her grasp as she gently throws up her hands. “You know? I didn’t really _try_ to understand it. And I think--I think what I’m trying to say is, I thought I was making you feel safe and protected, but the fact that...all this fear...when I read what you wrote--I…”

_Dear Mom,_

_I want to preface this with, I love you. I love you so much. I’ve always loved you. I think it’s easy to doubt that after everything we’ve been through and everything I’ve done. I can only tell you on paper now._

_I don’t want anything to change, even after you read this whole thing to the end. I think I’m really selfish when I ask that. Everything’s bound to change. I think I tried to deny that for so many years. I tried to tell myself that nothing had to change, and that I never needed to tell you this. I think I was actually okay with that for some time, because the one thing that scares me most is losing you_.

“I wasn’t scared of you,” Will says softly. “Never you.” He doesn’t add: not you, but of the world and everything in it, and for me that’s all wrapped up in you.

“Oh, Will,” says Joyce.

“I’m sorry,” Will says, like a question. His breath is turning to gasps.

_But the day came when I realized I couldn’t be me in the relationship I have with you, if I’m not honest about who I am with you. I’m really scared to say this. I want you to know that I never wanted to be this way. I didn’t look for it. Nobody told me to be like this. Everybody told me to be the opposite of who I am, but I guess it’s just been growing inside me and it can’t be hidden anymore._

_Mom, I’m gay. I know what that means. It means I’ll never marry a nice girl, never have kids of my own, never have you around for Thanksgiving and dinner to hang with the in-laws and meet the new baby._

_I know what this means for you. I also know what it means for me, and in spite of everything I’m starting to learn to be happy with who I am. I’m just really wishing and hoping that you’re going to learn to be okay with who I am, too._

“Will,” Joyce says again.

“Mom,” he says.

 _I have a dream in my head of what’s going to happen when you read this letter. You’ll open it, and sit down somewhere comfortable and read this thing from start to finish. Then you’re going to call me from my room and stand up to hug me. Then you’re going to tell me everything’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be all right_.

“Honey.” The first fleeting tremble of Joyce’s fingertips brushes over the curve of Will’s cheekbone. “Hey. Hey. Everything’s going to be okay.”

That’s all it takes for Will’s knees to buckle and for him to fall into the chair at the kitchen table like his life depends on it. He’s shaking, and he can’t look her in the eye even if he wants to, even if she bends down from the weight of him clutching at the sides of her chambray shirt just so she can fold her awkward, tender arms over the round of his back.

“Everything’s going to be all right, Will. Everything’s going to be okay.”

Tremors rock Will’s body. The tears don’t come--everything inside him dried up a long time ago when his throat dried up as well--but heat races through him, gallops through his veins. His lungs strain to drag the air into him. His breaths come short and heavy, and he thinks he might be dying. A pain punches him in the center of his chest and spreads like a virus to every part of him.

He thinks he’s falling to pieces, and he doesn’t know if Joyce’s hands and words will be enough to put him back together again.

“Cry, baby. It’s okay to cry. Just let it out.”

Still dry-eyed, Will lets out a sound somewhere between a whimper and a gasp and buries his head in his mother’s stomach.

“It’s not okay,” he says. Over and over. “It’s not okay. It’s not okay. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t, Will. Don’t.” Her fingers tangle at the back of his head. “It’s okay. I’m okay with who you are. I’ve _always_ been okay with who you are.”

Will can’t believe it. Some tiny part of him still believes that somehow, in light of all his fuck-ups in the world, the universe is still waiting to pull the rug out from under his feet and show him the truth of his mother’s reaction. That this is some twisted version of the Upside Down where he lives on false hopes and dreams, and any second now he’s going to wake up and he’ll be back to the gray reality he deserves where everyone sees him for who he is and he wanders alone into the nothingness.

Something in the mother nature of Joyce seems to sense the undercurrent of Will’s thoughts. The figure eight of her fingertips playing on Will’s scalp slows down, like her own heart is breaking for the mantle of guilt that can never be shaken from her boy’s shoulders.

“You don’t have to be okay with it,” Will mumbles.

She shakes him. “But I am.”

“There’s just--so much--” _So much darkness in me. So much nothing_.

“I’ll tell you what there’s so much of in you. There’s so much love in you, Will Byers. There’s a whole lot of care for your friends and family, and there’s a whopping amount of creativity inside you. Smartness. Kindness. Charm.”

_I don’t expect you to believe me, but please try to when I say I’m still the same kid you’ve known for fifteen years. I’m still the same kid who tries to be charming, who’s really quiet but who’s always thinking of something to draw or paint when you see me looking out the car window. I’m still the kid who always bombs English class but loves it whenever you try to help me. Even though we both really kind of suck at poetry._

“You’re Will Byers. Look at me, kid.”

A finger on his chin lifts his gaze to hers, gentle but insistent.

“You’re Will Byers, you hear? Will Byers, gay. Smart. Funny. Generous. Patient. Music lover. Can’t scrub a bathroom sink for shit.”

Will barks out a startled laugh, full of snot and dry-throated, shaking, ugly mirth.

“And what’s important is that you’re _my_ Will. You can be my gay son, but that changes nothing. Hear me? This changes nothing.”

Now Will really, really, really wants to cry.

“You really were too good for Dad,” Will says instead. Joking is easier. Joking will stop his mom from crying.

Turns out he was wrong in that calculation, though, because almost immediately the shining moisture spills over from Joyce’s eyes and splatters onto his own cheeks. And then she’s laughing, hysterically, without stopping.

“Looks like I _am_ gonna have to prepare myself for that ‘boy talk’ after all,” she gets out through a wobbly giggle.

Will rolls his eyes at her. And God, does it feel _good_. The tension is bleeding from him, bit by bit, and it’s enough for him to take control of his body again and loosen his fists in their grip on her shirt, and move his hands up instead to hug her just above the hips.

Joyce lets out another soft little sound that has no name. It can be described, though, described like this: she folds herself around him again, with the recognition that every day her boy grows stronger and braver than she could have ever dreamed of. But she tucks him into her embrace anyway, because some things cannot be taken away from mothers--and the knowledge that she will always be his first confidante and his last defense against the world is one of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much of Will's coming out letter is lifted almost word for word from my own coming out letter to my mom. I haven't given it to her yet--I have plans of handing it to her in February 2021, together with a book that will help her understand what it means to be both transgender and religious--but I'm prepared for the day of coming out to fall into my lap sooner than expected. This chapter was so, so personal to me because of that. I think there's something uniquely terrifying about baring your soul on paper and hanging in the balance, waiting for months to know whether you'll be rejected or accepted.
> 
> I appreciate y'all reading this chapter. Please don't hesitate to drop a little comment down below. I promise I will smile and cry over every little bit of reaction or feedback to this piece <3 -kaleb


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